Writers of series are often victims of their own success. They lay down the lines of their lead characters in the first book or two, and are then confined within those borders, not merely by rules of logic (“You said he had only two brothers”) but also because series readers can get very testy if a writer tries to change things up.

Reginald Hill, astonishingly, managed to escape the trap. With each book in the “Dalziel and Pascoe” series, he expanded both his characters’ characters and his own writerly paint-box. He said once that he had resolved early on to treat the series as a sort of scaffolding on which he could hang all the various kinds of novels he wanted to write – espionage, science fiction, historicals, etc. And it’s really with An April Shroud that this experiment began.

The first twist comes up front, with the focus on Andy Dalziel. Who on earth would make Dalziel a protagonist? He’s a rude, fat, balding bigot, hardly the kind of fellow with whom readers want to identify (and yet Hill’s talent is such that by the end of the book, you may well have changed your tune). Then there’s the setting: the classic English manor house, stuffed with a motley assortment of suspects- and victims-to-be. Who on earth would take that kind of setting, with its preciously crafted conventions, its dinner jackets and vicars and flighty ingénues, and set Andy Dalziel in the middle of things, the proverbial bull in a china shop?

Hill, apparently: With An April Shroud he created the improbable love-child of the traditional, Golden-Age country-house murder mystery and the tougher, edgier, more realistic cop drama (“police procedural” is the industry term) for which he was becoming known.

I use “love” advisedly, because onto this astonishing minotaur of a novel, Hill grafted a third genre: Romance. One could almost imagine Peter Pascoe as a romantic hero – young, fit, well educated — but instead, Hill sent Cupid to strike at Andy Dalziel’s aging, flabby heart. Dalziel! Who on earth would want to heave that bulk into bed? Ah, and yet again, by the end of the book, you may well have changed your tune. As a pure technical tour de force, An April Shroud is a marvel. But as a character study, a portrait of a man we thought we knew, it’s a joy. And it’s also – rather rare among mysteries – genuinely uplifting. If the dreadful, sweaty Andy Dalziel can find love, if he can command love from the reader, well then, perhaps even the sweatiest among us has grounds for hope.

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My birthday’s coming up in a few weeks – 39, darling, why do you ask? – and in thinking about a new blog post, I suddenly remembered the best birthday present I ever got.

My parents had split up when I was seven, and a few years later, my mother began dating a man, let’s call him Charles, who worked for the New York Times Book Review. I was, of course, deeply suspicious of Charles. He demanded some of my mother’s attention – the attention that belonged to me – and while the books I loved tended more toward wicked stepmothers, I didn’t guess that stepfathers were likely to be a whole lot better.

Boy, was I wrong. The Times Book Review, as you might expect, gets at least one copy of every book published in the English-speaking world, because every writer and publisher in the known universe is hoping for the meagerest of mentions. Well, no, they’re hoping for a rave from Michiko Kakutani, but in any case, they send in a copy. This story happened way back in the day, and for all I know things are done differently now, but at the time, all those books got piled up in one big room, and the Book Review staff was periodically ushered in for a nice literary pillage.

Charles, bless him, headed straight for the children’s section. And on the night of my tenth birthday he arrived at the front door, snow dusting his topcoat, and his glove-less fingers red and raw-looking, clutching the handles of maybe five enormous shopping bags that were filled to bursting with books.

And all of them, all of them for me! I am a greedy girl. I like my pleasures in volume, and even better than mounds of whipped cream or vats of chocolate pudding or spilling piles of cushions and sparkly things, better than all of those…would be bags and bags of books. More than I could carry to my bedroom in three trips, more than I could read before I turned eleven. To this day, that’s my best birthday ever.

I’ve had other terrific book-presents. A friend once gave me a new hardcover that he knew I wanted, at a time when neither of us could easily afford hardcover books.  My mother gave me Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons, and my father gave me The Once and Future King, and I think it’s fair to say that those two books represent the poles between which my character tends to shuttle. But more wonderful than all of these was Charles dripping melting snow onto our doormat, my own personal Santa, with the bags and bags and bags and bags of books.

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The perfect solution for the giftee who wants to pick the books. Gift certficiates are easy to wrap, one-size-fits-all, and everybody likes’m. They cost $16 per book, which includes shipping. Just decide how many books you would like to offer to your nifty giftee, and shoot us an EMAIL.

Please DO include your phone number in the email, and the best time to call you.

Please DO NOT include your credit-card info in the email; the Internet Gremlins are everywhere, and we’ll ask you for the info over the phone.

We look forward to talking to you. Happy Reading!

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As many of you know, I used to own a bookstore. And while Christmas and Chanukah were, no question, big events for us, they didn’t hold a candle (hee! Candle! Chanuk….oh, never mind) to Rosh Hashanah, Easter, and Thanksgiving. Why? My partners and I had two theories about this. One was that on these traditionally family-heavy holidays, people without families wanted to escape their loneliness with a good book. The other theory—and we leaned in this direction—was that after a day or two of enforced togetherness, our customers knew they would be desperate for a little mental refuge. Actually, we used to do land-office business right after the holidays in question: People, we reasoned, felt they deserved some serious rewards after three days of being nice to crazy Aunt Selma.

Actually, it’s a truism widely known in bookstores (and probably throughout retail in general) that January is one of the better months for business. January? With all the sleet and dieting and general yuckiness that winter can provide? Yup. The holiday credit-card bills don’t hit till the tail-end, so you’ve got a good three weeks to pretend you’re in the chips. And just as important – and here’s Aunt Selma again – you spent an awful lot of time recently buying and baking and wrapping and smiling for other people’s benefit: Here at last is the point at which you can stop holding your stomach in, revert to your happily grouchy self, and read all damn afternoon, if that’s what appeals. And for our customers, that’s exactly what appeals, so they would come in and pick up an armload of their favorite thrillers or puzzlers or WittyBrits, secure in the knowledge that they were, at last, buying a lovely stack of books for someone absolutely sure to appreciate them.

May you do the same.

Ho ho ho, and see you in the stacks

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Funny mysteries. It’s a genre that many have tried, but few have conquered. The Felony & Mayhem list contains some of the gems of the genre – off the top of my head: Unorthodox Practices, by Marissa Peisman; Unnatural Fire, by Fidelis Morgan; The Herring-Sellers’ Apprentice, by LC Tyler, just about anything by Caroline Graham – but the true master of the snickering snee, so far as I’m concerned, is Robert Barnard. His gleeful, dyspeptic evisceration of “theatricals” in Death and the Chaste Apprentice and Death on the High C’s makes me wheeze with laughter, even on the sixth or seventh reading. And yet, when he turns his pen to more serious stories, as in Out of the Blackout or Skeleton in the Grass, there are few writers who can touch him for nuanced characterization and a specific, incredibly evocative sense of place and time.

So why aren’t we highlighting any of these books? Because Corpse in a Gilded Cage, to my mind, combines the best of all of them. The story, about a Cockney family that inherits an earldom (and the drafty manor house that goes with it) is as deliciously funny as one could possibly desire, but the characterizations – even when they are perfectly embodying “stuffy” or “crass” or “vulgar as a dirty joke in church” – are stunning. I’m particularly fond of the new Earl and his lady (both of whom would much rather be back in their crummy old flat), but Phil, the son and heir (only recently released from Her Majesty’s penal system) is a delightful piece of work. He’ll do you out of your wallet in such charming style that you’ll thank him for doing it and offer him your watch.

I promised a book that would touch on the theme of fresh starts, and a fresh start complete with 27 bedrooms and live-in staff strikes me as the very finest kind. Of course, it isn’t all tea and crumpets, but we’re mystery fans here: Would we want it any other way?

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I’ve never understood the appeal of counting sheep. When I can’t sleep, what I need is something safe, totally free of anxiety, with which to occupy my mind. And the key here is occupy: If my mind doesn’t have something to chew on, something to play with, something with which to occupy its little self, it will slip all too easily into some bad old habits, asking why I didn’t do X, why I did Y, what on earth I’m going to do about A and B and C. Those habits are powerful. They would eat the sheep for breakfast, with a nice Chianti.

For a long time, my secret weapon has been children’s books. I know there is a vogue, particularly in YA literature, for “problem” novels – my mother drinks, my best friend has a gambling problem, and so on – but I don’t read those books. I like books about children who are forced to take dancing lessons. Noel Streatfeild wrote jillions of them, and they’re all enormously soothing, because the worst thing that ever happens is something like blowing an audition for “Babes in Toyland.” Since I myself have blown any number of auditions and yet lived to tell the tale, I am able to empathize with Our Heroine’s despair while confident that the episode will not scar her permanently. As I said, very soothing. Twenty pages, and I’m nodding.

I also like old-fashioned English books about children who have adventures — magical or otherwise — in large part because these books always seem to involve picnics, and there is almost nothing more relaxing than reading about other people’s meals: All of the food-thoughts, none of the guilt.

But notice I said almost nothing. Some months ago I had a bad bout of anxiety-riddled insomnia, and it coincided with my recognition of a depressing factoid: Most of the meals described in these books are pretty awful. Hard-boiled eggs — with no mention of salt — feature prominently, as do bottles of lukewarm lemonade that someone has been lugging around for hours in the wan rays of an English sun. Faced with a meal like that, I would tend to seize the opportunity to lose a few pounds.

I love these characters. After all, I have been reading and re-reading their stories for almost my entire life. And friends do not let friends eat unsalted hard-boiled eggs. Clearly, someone was going to have to feed these people better.

The most important rule I set for myself was that all food had to be period- and place-appropriate. So no Gummi Bears for the early-20th-century Railway Children, no sushi for the kids in Knight’s Castle, packed off to their Midwest relatives in 1956. And no strawberries for scenes set in a London January. I realized fairly quickly that in creating meals for characters in the English books I love, the rationing of World War II and the post-war period represented a real challenge: I just couldn’t get excited (or sleepy) about fish paste and powdered eggs. In fact, working my way around the privations of Austerity Britain proved to be just a bit more mental occupation than I wanted. So sadly, I left my Noel Streatfeild books behind. It’s true that in Movie Shoes, the children in question travel to Southern California, home of the cheeseburger and the double chocolate shake, but since they are modest, disciplined English children (rather than, you know, sloppy, hedonistic American ones), their parents insist that they eat only “the simple foods they are used to.” Where they found fish paste sandwiches in 1940s Los Angeles I can’t begin to imagine.

My second revelation was that there was no need for me to be constrained by the meals mentioned in the books. After all, characters are people, and people have to eat, even if the author has somehow neglected to mention that it’s dinner time. For my first foray of this kind, I sent Miss Elizabeth Bennett to lunch at a hotel in Bath, with her friend Charlotte Lucas. What would these two supremely well brought up young women be doing alone in Bath and lunching on their own? Damned if I know. Not my problem. The question is: What would they eat?

Something very tidy, I decided — no messy salad leaves, no dripping sauces. And something fairly plain: Lizzie enjoys food, but doesn’t pay a great deal of attention to it. (Her mother, by contrast, both greedy and a status-whore, would be torn between the richest and the most expensive things on the menu, and would wind up ordering too much of both.) Miss Lucas, I think, gets a certain amount of satisfaction from denying her own desires; she would order something so meager — a bowl of broth? With a bit of bread and butter on the side? — as to be just a little ludicrous. But Lizzie, having eaten a lamb cutlet and new-season asparagus, would persuade her friend to indulge a little at dessert, insisting that she order some stewed plums with the luxury of custard.

Sorting out the lunch menu had taken me a few nights, each time sending me off to an untroubled sleep. I was onto something. For quite a while I combined this new technique with my old favorite, feeding the people in some of my best-loved children’s books. I threw out the hard-boiled eggs and gave the Five Children and It some genuinely tasty picnics, in which cheddar cheese and crisp apples played starring roles. I let Harriet the Spy keep her lunchtime tomato sandwiches, but spent several peaceful evenings determining what she’d like for dinner. My greatest triumph involved sending Nancy Drew and her best galpals to lunch in Paris. Nancy, I decided (rather like Lizzie Bennett) would opt for something tasty and tidy: Artichoke vinaigrette, grilled trout, creamed potatoes, fruit tart. Bess, eternally on a diet, would spend the entire time gazing longingly at the pastry trolley. And beanpole George, with a teenage boy’s appetite and the metabolism to accommodate it, would indulge in a glutton’s wet dream: Pate trowelled onto lengths of crusty bread, shellfish stew with more bread to mop things up, green salad with runny cheese, a vat of chocolate mousse.

At shamefully long last it occurred to me to feed my Felonious friends. Easily my favorites in this regard are Gianni and Guastafeste from The Rainaldi Quartet and Paganini’s Ghost. Old-school Italians, they welcome a splendid lunch. I’m thinking some salami and olives, pasta tossed with fried zucchini, chicken with thyme and lemon, and to finish, a perfect pear and a glass of moscato.

Fat Andy Dalziel, by contrast, doesn’t much care what you put in front of him, so long as it’s simple, ample, and accompanied by a barrel of best bitter. Sadly, I think we’re talking microwave lasagna on a good day, with the occasional lunch consisting in its entirety of potato chips and pickled onions. Peter Pascoe, his sidekick in the Dalziel and Pascoe series, has somewhat more sophisticated tastes, but I have a terrible feeling that Ellie, at least in the early books, fed him a lot of Tofu Surprise. Master Wong, the Feng Shui Detective, is passionate about dim sum, but he eats so well on his own (except when the office manager steals his dumplings) that he doesn’t really need my help. The same cannot be said of Faith Zanetti: My favorite line of dialogue in her series (from Vodka Neat) is “The dead twins stole my chicken!” But to be honest, I’m not really persuaded that she would have cooked the chicken very well if they hadn’t. It’s tough to get her to concentrate on food, especially when there’s alcohol within reach, but I did once get her to sit down to some mince and mashed potatoes; she got all teary and said it was like the tea her Nana used to make.

In recent weeks, I’ve regressed a bit, going back to Harry Potter (and spending happy hours imagining just what those magical end-of-term banquets involve). But very soon, I’m going to be headed back Felony way. My next stop, I think, is a reread of The Accomplice, by Elizabeth Ironside. As it happens, it’s a book I love. But even more important, it offers scope for both middle-class English and Eastern European meals. Mmmmm, cabbage soup. Smoked-salmon sandwiches. Friends, I’m getting sleepy already.

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From City Book Review:

“A devastatingly accurate recreation of life in the upper reaches of British society in 1952-3, nicely capturing the paper-thin hypocrisy of those in positions of influence.”

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A review of Ghost Song from the e-zine Curled Up with a Good Book:

“Ghost Song will scare you, titillate you, and keep you turning pages until you find out exactly what happens to Toby Chance, a successful songwriter who eerily disappears in 1914….[A] delightful read.”

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If I could, I’d send all of you a tall glass of something cold, but failing that, I figured we should discount a book that would whisk you away to a place where hot-and-sticky isn’t even a recent memory. To be honest, the best “chill you out” book I can think of is The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, a spectacularly wonderful children’s classic with scenes – indelibly printed on my memory – of a train puffing frantically across a snow-covered landscape as packs of howling wolves come ever closer, and Sylvia, shivering in her thin white dress, watches in terror as her companion breaks the window and takes aim at the ravenous brutes with his blunderbuss….

But we don’t publish Willoughby Chase, so I can’t offer you a discount. Instead I’m going to recommend the extraordinary Missing, by Karin Alvtegen. Now,  I wouldn’t lie, but just in case you were skeptical, I’m not the only person who finds this book extraordinary. It won the Glass Key award, given annually for the best “Nordic” crime novel, and in 2008 our edition was shortlisted for an Edgar award for best crime novel of the year. The reviews, both here and overseas, have been stunning – the Brits, for example, have likened Alvtegen to “Ruth Rendell at her very best,” while more than one U.S. blogger has compared Missing (favorably) to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo –  and the Swedish press has dubbed Alvtegen the country’s “Queen of Crime.”

But will it raise a chill? Oh yes. The heroine is Sybilla, who has spent the past 18 years homeless, on the icy streets of Stockholm, craving anonymity more than warmth, more than safety, more than a bed. And indeed, when she yields, briefly, to the lure of a warm bed, she invites catastrophe: A murdered man and Sybilla’s face, on the front page of every paper, as the chief suspect. Desperate to regain invisibility, her only hope lies in tracking down the murderer. It’s a story of ice, in more ways than one. And in Sybilla’s quest to lose herself, to find her home in….in homelessness, is provides one of the most interesting motivations I’ve ever come across.

An interesting factoid? As published in Swedish, and then in translation in the UK, the book opens with a semi-religious rant in the mind of the killer. This is followed by a terrific scene involving a scam Sybilla is running at a fancy hotel. When we were getting ready to print our edition, I got in touch with the author, and told her I wanted to switch the order of those two scenes; I thought the scene in the hotel made for a much stronger opener. She consented to the change, and I like to think that the switch played some role in the book’s earning an Edgar nomination.

Incidentally, if any of you are collectors, we do have signed first-edition hardcovers of Missing, as well as the paperbacks. While the British edition was the true first, our hardcovers are the only signed editions of any of Alvtegen’s books, and they differ from the UK edition with respect to the switch discussed above.

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